SEO HOWTO

SEO means Search Engine Optimizing. This HOWTO describes as short as possible how to make your wiki-pages on a Heddate-site (like Elftown) be found by search engines, but the information is useful for all webmasters.

Why pay attention to SEO?

If you write something on the web, it's often because you want it to be read and be read by the right people. If you don't want your information to be found, don't export the wiki-page (or if you're a webmaster: Make a robot.txt-file.) and stop reading here.

So let us start providing the web with our useful information that will benefit humankind and all that's good and just.

Selecting keywords

This is the most important step! Select 1-5 keywords that totally describe what your page is about. Have a little thought about competition though. Even if your page describes "sex" generally, you have to be more specific, otherwise you'll never be found. Unless your page will be very very very good, of course. But if your page describes a keyword that you can't find at all on Google, then one keyword is enough, but you can add more if the page contains information about that too. But it's generally best to use the rule one page - one information. Make two pages if it's two things you're describing, and make subpages if you have a general page and pieces of more specific information.

Start writing the page

Now you have the keywords. So create a wiki-page with these keywords in its name! Don't name the wiki-page "Joey's art", if it's an art-page about anime horse art. Then name it either "Anime horse art by Joey" or only "anime horse art". Remember that both search engines and people reading the page will not like too long page names.

If it's an image-page, you can start creating it by going to your house and press the "upload a folder of images"-button, but still pay attention to selecting a good wiki-page name!

Then on the page you should write what the page is about on the very top. Something like <h1>Anime horse art by Joey</h1> and maybe a welcome example image showing anime horse art by Joey.

Don't forget that the page must be exported!

About images

Many people use the image-search on Google. To be found there, there are two alternatives. Firstly you can write what the image is about close to it. It works best if you have a double new-line before the image and then right after the image write what it is. The problem is of course that you can't write only for the search-engine, but you have to write something that is acceptable to read also. "anime icelandic horse" might be OK, but you probably want to write "An anime Icelandic horse I draw as a gift to a friend".

Secondly you can write titles. Write a parenthesis right after the image-tag. Like this <img:stuff/mystuff.jpg>(Anime Icelandic horse). The title will be shown when someone hover their pointer over the image and Google will also read this text. Combine this is sometimes a good idea, especially when you want to write something the ones viewing the page and something different for people only seeing the image. Example: "Yet another one" might be good as a description, but not as a title.

Even if your page isn't image-centered, it's always good to have some image on it! Both people and search-engines like images.

Links

Don't be afraid to link to your competitors! It will give them a boost in rating, but it's very useful for the ones visiting your page and it will in the long run reward you with a higher rating.

Getting the page known

So now you have a very good page which precisely describes one subject. But it will not be found unless you tell the world about it. What you need now is links to the page. You can write links from your web-pages outside of Elftown, and that is very good! And it's even better if those web-pages are top-pages (like http://www.elfpack.com/ but unlike http://www.elfpack.com/_cakes ). When you link to the wiki-page, you should use the exported wiki-page name, generally. But it still works to link to the "wiki.html?name=SEO+HOWTO"-name too.

But you should also have links from within the site. Try to get links from related wiki-pages! Use the Google-search on bottom of every page to find out if there are some general page about your subject where you can add links to your page.

You can also get help from the Elftown crew if they rate your wiki-page. That means that you'll get a link from the most informative wiki-pages page, for example. Otherwise links from Mainstreet help a lot too, but not every page has a reason to be there.

Is that all?

Well, yes. If you remember that your page has to be clear what it is about, you're having good content on it and a number of good links to it, it should be on top of the correct search in a month or so depending of the competition.

About this page

This page was written by [Hedda] to have somewhere to point people who are writing content. You're welcome to correct things or add stuff, but I want to keep this page short, so I suggest you write a comment about it.

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2007-01-10[Hedda]: Title? I guess you're talking about heading, not titles.

I doubt any search engine would care about the center-tag at all. Sometimes they care a little about bold and italic though (In a positive way usually).

2007-01-30[Artsieladie]: I've read this a couple of times. Each time, I understand a little more. In the keywords, for my images of Pegasus, I would enter: Pegasus & art, but what else? Elftown? My name? Other? Does it matter the order that you place your keywords in. In other words, is the first word more important than, say, the fourth or fifth word of the words you type in? :P

2007-01-30[Hedda]: "pegasus art", maybe with "image" too, would be fine. The order might be important, but it's up to what the search engine thinks.

If you're expecting people to search for your name, then you can add it there.

Adding "elftown" is just bad. The page isn't about Elftown and the word "elftown" appears on the page anyhow. It's always better with fewer keywords as it makes the ones you mention stronger.

2007-01-30[Hedda]: "less is more" is a unix-joke... "less" is one program that does almost exactly the same thing as "more", but "less" is more than "more", so "less is more than more" or the short "less is more", but you can also say that "less is more" as they are almost the same thing... Yepp, that's what geeks do all day.

2007-10-04[Artsieladie]: Jitters, speaking of Digital art resources, do you think I should wait until I can put more than one image in a tube, or donate them as just one in a tube? I don't know when I'll have some extra time to study the tutorial you sent me on them. :P I've got quite a bit on my plate right now, but it wouldn't that much to make my png's into psp's. :)